Notice of upcoming releases and breaking changes for GitHub Actions

Ubuntu-latest upcoming breaking changes

We will migrate the ubuntu-latest label to ubuntu 24 starting on December 5, 2024 and ending on January 17, 2025. The ubuntu 24 image has a different set of tools and packages than ubuntu 22. We have made cuts to the list of packages so that we can maintain our SLA for free disk space. This may break your workflows if you depend on certain packages that have been removed. Please review this list to see if you are using any affected packages.

Ubuntu 20 image is closing down

We are beginning the process of closing down the Ubuntu 20 hosted runner image, following our N-1 OS support policy. This image will be fully retired by April 1, 2025. We recommend updating workflows to use ubuntu-22.04, or ubuntu-24.04.

Artifacts v3 brownouts

Artifact actions v3 will be closing down by January 30th, 2025. To raise awareness of the upcoming removal, we will temporarily fail jobs using v3 of actions/upload-artifact or actions/download-artifact. Builds that are scheduled to run during the brownout periods will fail. The brownouts are scheduled for the following dates and times:
– January 9th 5pm – 6pm UTC
– January 16th 3pm – 7pm UTC
– January 23rd 2pm – 10pm UTC

actions/cache v1-v2 and actions/toolkit cache package closing down

Starting February 1st, 2025, Actions’ cache storage will move to a new architecture, as a result we are closing down v1-v2 of actions/cache as well as all previous versions of the @actions/cache package(prior to 4.0.0) in actions/toolkit.
Attempting to use a version of the @actions/cache package after the announced deprecation date will result in a workflow failure. Announcements have been posted in the actions/cache and actions/toolkit repositories with additional information on the migration. Note that this does not affect GitHub Enterprise Server customers, you can continue to use all versions without failure.

Updates to the network allow list for self-hosted runners and Azure private networking

With the upcoming GA of Immutable Actions, Actions will now be stored as packages in the GitHub Container Registry. Please ensure that your self-hosted runner allow lists are updated to accommodate the network traffic. Specifically, you should allow traffic to pkg.actions.githubusercontent.com to ensure Immutable Actions can be downloaded successfully and jobs don’t fail during setup. If you already allow *.actions.githubusercontent.com which is listed as an required domain then no action is necessary. Traffic will also be required to ghcr.io for publishing new versions of an Immutable Action in the future, which will be available with the GA release.

This update also affects runners in all versions of GitHub Enterprise Server that use the GitHub Connect feature to download actions directly from github.com. Customers are advised to update their self-hosted runner network allow lists accordingly. For further guidance on communication between self-hosted runners and GitHub, please refer to our documentation.

Additionally, our guidance for configuring Azure private networking has been updated to account for the new domains. The following IP addresses have been added to the NSG template in our documentation.
– 140.82.121.33/32
– 140.82.121.34/32
– 140.82.113.33/32
– 140.82.113.34/32
– 140.82.112.33/32
– 140.82.112.34/32
– 140.82.114.33/32
– 140.82.114.34/32
– 192.30.255.164/31
– 4.237.22.32/32
– 20.217.135.1/32
– 4.225.11.196/32
– 20.26.156.211/32

Upcoming breaking image changes

For a full list of this month’s breaking changes to our hosted runner images, please see our announcement page.